Google Advanced Search – The Ultimate Guide

by Janko Glavonjić ·
Published December 12, 2016
· Updated December 12, 2016

Google advanced search is something that every writer, SEO or virtual assistant has to master to fulfill their daily tasks. Over one billion people use Google, but how many people uses Google advanced search?

More than a half of planet Earth’s entire population uses internet in 2016. For most of them, Google is the number one choice for a search engine. Home page for hundreds of millions is also google.com. If we look at those numbers, it is almost impossible to believe that less than 10% of those people know how to use Google advanced search. But it is true.

Freelance writers, SEO experts and virtual assistants are, naturally, better researchers than regular people. That is one of the basic requirements for their job, so that’s a fact that doesn’t raise any eyebrows. However, even they struggle when they have to “level up” their search, dig deeper into Google and find that critical piece of information they need.

Some of them are aware of Google search operators list, but they are struggling when they have to pick the right one for the specific inquiry.

First of all, I will divide all the operators into groups. Specific Google advanced search operators can be used for web search, image search, groups, directory, news and product search. See the table below:

Out of all of these commands, you will mostly use “intitle”:, “inurl”:, “intext” and “author”:

Pay attention – you will have to use : after the command, or it won’t be valid!

Most important Google search operators

Let’s dig into these four operators that you will be using most often.

intitle: This operator will restrict results to websites that contain the term in the title. For example, intitle:fitness will give you all results that have the keyword “fitness” in the title. If you want to narrow down the search using long tail keywords, you will have to use the operator allintitle:. If you try, for example, to use intitle:fitness tips for women, the search will give you only results with the keyword “fitness” in title, with tips for women mentioned in the text.

inurl: This operator will restrict results to websites that contain the term in the URL. For example, the search inurl:travel will find websites that mention the word “travel” in their URL. Similar to allintitle:, you can use allinurl: operator, if you want to include more words into your search query. This search is good for finding that website you liked but didn’t bookmark (because you’re apparently too absent-minded to remember simple tasks) and you only remember part of their URL. If you’re anything like me in that regard, this will save you.

intext: This operator will restrict results to websites that contain the terms in the text. For example intext:antiquity will give you all web pages that mention the word “antiquity”. Like the search operators mentioned above, you can use allintext: operator if you want to narrow the search with a long tail keyword. However, if you use intext: with some long tail keyword, the results will be similar, since most of the keywords we are using in a basic Google search will be found in the body of the text.

author: This Google search operator is very handy. By using it, you can find all texts from a specific author, and not only that, you can narrow your search down even by entering a topic. Since there is no allinauthor operator, you will have to use author: operator twice, for the first name and the last name. For example, author:John author:Smith. If you know the email address of the author, you can use that too – author:johnsmith@someemail.com. If you are searching for a particular topic he covered, for instance, news related to Mars exploration, you will use Mars exploration author:John author: Smith in your Google advanced search.

Google advanced search for writers

Google advanced search is especially important for freelance writers and bloggers. Most people will use these search operators to find a writing gig. With the right combination of keywords and these operators, skillful researchers will find even hundreds of websites that have an open paid writing position, or at least left a guest-posting option.

Search operators should be combined with a desired niche like this:

<Niche> + allintitle:”Submit blog post” or allintitle:”write for us” or allintitle:”Submit an article” or allintitle:“Suggest a guest post” or allintitle:“Send a guest post” or allintitle:“Write for us”

<Niche> + allintitle:“Become an author” or allintitle:“Guest bloggers wanted” or allintitle:“Contribute to our site” or allintitle:“Become a contributor”

As you can see, there are almost infinite amount of possibilities. This can be used not only by writers, even designers and programmers can use this when they search for a job, while virtual assistants can also benefit from mastering this type of search.